Internet Filters Block Many Useful Sites, Study Finds

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: December 11, 2002

Teenagers who look to the Internet for health information as part of their ''wired generation'' birthright are blocked from many useful sites by antipornography filters that federal law requires in school and library computers, a new study has found.

The filtering programs tend to block references to sex and sex-related terms, like ''safe sex,'' ''condoms,'' ''abortion,'' ''jock itch,'' ''gay'' and ''lesbian.'' Although the software can be adjusted to allow access to most health-related Web sites, many schools and libraries ratchet up the software's barriers to highest settings, the report said.

''A little bit of filtering is O.K., but more isn't necessarily better,'' said Vicky Rideout, vice president of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, which produced the report, to be published today in The Journal of the American Medical Association. ''If they are set too high, they can be a serious obstacle to health information.''

The researchers found that filters set at the least restrictive level blocked an average of 1.4 percent of health sites; at the most restrictive level, filters blocked nearly 25 percent of health sites. The amount of pornography blocked, however, was fairly consistent: 87 percent at the least restrictive level, 91 percent at the most restrictive.

The programs blocked a much higher percentage of health sites devoted to safe-sex topics: 9 percent at the least restrictive level and 50 percent at the most restrictive. The blocked pages at high levels included The Journal of the American Medical Association's site for women's health and a page with online information from the Food and Drug Administration about clinical trials.

To the researchers, the results mean that a school or library that uses a less restrictive setting for Internet filters can lose very little of the protective effect of the filters, while minimizing the tendency of filters to block harmless and even valuable sites.

The report is the first major study of the effectiveness of filters to appear in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and the first to look at the effectiveness of filters at various settings. Most previous studies have been produced by organizations with a strong point of view either favoring or opposing filters. The Kaiser Foundation is a nonprofit health research group. David Burt, an antipornography advocate who is a spokesman for the filtering company N2H2, said he was pleased with the report, which he called ''very thoughtful and well designed -- they recognized it matters a lot how you configure a filter and set it up.''

But opponents of filtering requirements said the study showed the technology's clumsiness.

''Filters are just fine for parents to use at home,'' said Judith F. Krug, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association. ''They are not appropriate for institutions that might be the only place where kids can get this information.''

''The importance of the First Amendment,'' Ms. Krug said, ''is that it provides us with the ability to govern ourselves, because it guarantees that you have the right to access information. The filters undercut that ability.''

Nancy Willard, an Oregon educator who has written student guides that emphasize personal responsibility in Internet surfing, called filtering a kind of censorship that, if performed by the schools directly, would be unconstitutional.

''These filtering companies are protecting all information about what they are blocking as confidential trade secrets,'' Ms. Willard said. ''This is nothing more than stealth censorship.''

The study was conducted for the foundation by University of Michigan researchers, who tested six leading Internet filtering programs. The researchers searched for information on 24 health topics, including breast cancer and birth control, and also for pornographic terms. They performed the tests at each of three settings. At the least restrictive setting, only pornography is supposed to be blocked; an intermediate setting also bars sites with nudity and other controversial material like illicit drugs. The most restrictive setting possible for each product may block sites in dozens of other categories.

The researchers then called 20 school districts and library systems around the United States to ask how they set their filters. Of the school systems, which teach a half million students over all, only one set its filters at the least restrictive level.

The issue of library filtering is making its way through the federal courts. Last month the Supreme Court agreed to hear a Bush administration defense of the Children's Internet Protection Act, the federal law requiring schools and libraries to use filters on computers used by children or to lose technology money. A special panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, struck down part of the law that applied to libraries as unconstitutional. Chief Judge Edward R. Becker wrote that filters were a ''blunt instrument'' for protecting children.